Manuelle Gautrand Wraps a 1970s Annecy Department Store in a Constellation of Glass and Concrete

Few retail buildings in the French Alps carry as much architectural baggage as the Galeries Lafayette in Annecy. Designed by Antoine Bory in 1969, the original department store planted itself in the city center with a double ring of raised parking wrapped around a square commercial core, all resting on regularly spaced piles. It was a piece of infrastructure more than a piece of urbanism, and it spent five decades making that clear. When Manuelle Gautrand Architecture began studying the site in 2011, the question was not whether the building needed change, but how much of its stubborn geometry could be turned into a virtue.

The answer, delivered after seven years of study and completed in 2023, is Les Nouvelles Galeries: a 27,500 square meter complex that keeps the existing 17,500 square meters virtually intact while adding 10,000 square meters of new volume. Five satellite structures, curved and glazed, wrap around the west, south, and southeast facades like celestial bodies in orbit. Virtually nothing was demolished. Instead, the project reads the old building's circular DNA and amplifies it, turning a car-centric monolith into a porous, daylit constellation of shops, restaurants, planted plazas, and green roofs. It is one of the more patient acts of architectural judo completed in France this decade.

An Alpine Skyline Meets a Pleated Skin

Seen from the air, the building no longer reads as a defensive square. The new curved volumes blur the boundary between structure and landscape, their green roof terraces stepping up in spirals that soften the massing against the mountain backdrop. Brushed and mirror aluminum composite cladding catches light at different angles throughout the day, while the glazed pleats of the new facades deliberately echo the concrete pleating of the original parking rings. The result is a double rhythm, old and new, that produces an almost kinetic effect as you move around the perimeter.

The planted rooftops are not decorative. Porous surfaces were enlarged across the project, and rainwater is captured and redirected to irrigate the green roofs and the additional planting introduced at ground level. Combined with the near-zero demolition strategy, this earned the project a BREEAM Excellent certification, a notable achievement for a retail conversion of this scale.

Three Plazas, Three Points of Entry

The original building pushed pedestrians under its parking decks with little ceremony. Gautrand's intervention flips that relationship entirely. Three public entrance plazas are positioned at the west, south, and east cardinal points, each shaped by the conch-like curves of the new volumes. At ground level, a glass curtain wall entrance with an overhead canopy opens the building to the street in a way that the 1970s layout never allowed. The circular satellite volumes are arranged along the site edges, maximizing street visibility and drawing people in rather than walling them out.

Inside, the entrance mall and most public facilities are installed beneath the existing car park, occupying space that was previously dead infrastructure. Several of the new circular volumes slip above or beneath the old parking rings, threading through the structure like a second circulatory system. The spatial logic is generous: large windows along all elevations ensure natural light penetrates deep into the roughly 40 shops and restaurants the complex now accommodates.

Interior Character: Timber, Light, and Savoyard Grit

The interior design, handled by Danish practice Studio David Thulstrup, layers Savoyard material references over contemporary retail architecture. Timber slat walls and baffle ceilings warm corridors that could otherwise feel like generic malls, while exposed mechanical ducts are left visible rather than concealed behind dropped ceilings. The effect is deliberately raw in places, an honest acknowledgment of the building's infrastructural bones rather than an attempt to disguise them.

The long hallway shown in afternoon light, with floor-to-ceiling glazing on one side and timber baffles overhead, demonstrates how effectively the double-skin facade system controls solar gain while still flooding the interior with light. It is the kind of simple, well-executed detail that separates a good retail renovation from a forgettable one. Grey anodized aluminum envelopes encase the glazing panels between upper and lower concrete slabs, creating a chiseled sequence of folds that alternate between transparent and opaque, giving shoppers a constantly shifting view of the mountains and the city.

Structural Dialogue: New Curves on Old Piles

The structural challenge here was real. The existing car park sits on two levels of elevated parking, each resting on a grid of piles, with the double ring tangential to the four corners of the central department store volume. Gautrand's team, working with structural engineers Khephren and facade engineers T/e/s/s, introduced curved sections of precast concrete installed vertically to form the new car park facade structure. Glass elements are inset between upper and lower slabs, creating an openwork facade that reads as both screen and structure.

The key decision was to avoid demolition. By grafting new volumes onto the existing frame rather than gutting it, the project sidestepped enormous embodied carbon costs. The few square meters of partitions that were removed are negligible in the context of a 27,500 square meter building. This is adaptive reuse at its most literal: the old bones carry the new body.

Plans and Drawings

The elevation drawing reveals the horizontal massing strategy clearly. Slender columns support the raised parking decks, while the new volumes read as smooth, curved interruptions to the original grid. The drawing also makes visible how little the overall height was increased: Gautrand kept the new additions roughly within the envelope of the existing structure, a courtesy to the Alpine skyline that the original 1970s building never extended to its neighbors.

Why This Project Matters

Les Nouvelles Galeries matters because it refuses the two easiest options. It does not demolish a problematic building and start fresh, and it does not apply a cosmetic facelift that leaves the underlying urban dysfunction untouched. Instead, it takes a structure that was designed to serve cars and, over twelve years of patient work, rewires it to serve people. The near-zero demolition approach, the BREEAM Excellent rating, and the 10,000 square meters of new program all achieved without razing the old, make it a compelling model for European retail renovation.

Gautrand's conceptual frame of a constellation becoming architecture could easily have stayed metaphorical. What gives it weight is the structural and material rigor: the precast concrete curves that extend the old building's circular logic, the pleated glass that rhymes with the parking ring's concrete folds, and the green roofs that turn dead deck space into productive landscape. At 37 million euros for the extension, it was not cheap. But as a demonstration that postwar commercial buildings deserve the same careful rethinking we grant to historic monuments, it earns every euro.

Les Nouvelles Galeries, Annecy, France. Architecture by Manuelle Gautrand Architecture. Interior design by Studio David Thulstrup. Total area: 27,500 m² (17,500 m² existing, 10,000 m² extension). Completed 2023. Photography by Luc Boegly.

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